Junctures - The Journal for Thematic Dialogue
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Striking (Up) Interspecies Collaborations with Crows and Falcons
Get PDFThis essay discusses two different kinds of human collaboration with wildlife. First, I consider the short non-fictional text Krähengekrächz (2016) by German author Monika Maron. Second, I look at young artist Hara Walther’s body of work, including her falconry, work she performs with her animal companion Sicilia.1 I deem both creative engagements to be two distinct yet related cases of zoopoetics (more on this below).2
Maron’s text is an incomplete and tentative account (in German Erzählung) of her attempts at striking up a friendship with a crow in the Berlin neighbourhood where she lives. As the writer announces at the outset, her experiment in interspecies companionship is initially in the service of a planned novel featuring a crow among its main characters.3 However, as I shall argue, while explicitly conceived with such an agenda in mind, precisely by following the crow’s movements, Maron’s text strays from such a goal –or map– but rather follows what Thom van Dooren might call the crow’s “interjections”. For Van Dooren, an interjection involves an interruption of the status quo, a getting in between what is and what might be, whether verbally or bodily, in an effort to realize something different, to propose an alternative configuration of how we may get on together.4 Indeed, Maron’s text functions as one such interjection itself, for, in being “recruited” by the crows, the narrative breaks away from any specific genre. As I hope to make clear below, this story or rather collection of stories is less the result of the author’s intention than a meandering response to the crows’ own experimental gestures in the emergent interspecies contact zone where woman and crows meet.5
Walther’s art is the offspring of her long partnership with Sicilia. For example, Walther has created colouring books for children, books she uses to teach falconry in her school Falconette, as well as watercolour paintings and assemblages with materials acquired during her hunts with Sicilia.6 Her art is made of markings that, as is the case in Maron’s text, are neither authorial nor authoritative. In contrast, her art follows the trail left by her wild animal companion and collects the traces as gifts. Issues of creativity, vulnerability, and impermanence punctuate the joyous gestures of cobecoming in Walther’s work. For this artist, therefore, falcon and human are creatively joined in the everyday practices of falconry, teaching, and art
Whakamana Te Tuakiri o Ngā Wāhine Māori I Te Ao Whutuporo : Flourishing Wāhine Māori Identities in Rugby: A Literature Review
Get PDFThis article presents a qualitative, autoethnographic exploration of personal realities and lived experiences in rugby. The literature highlights the potential harm of imposing a Westernised 'one size fits all' team culture, particularly in relation to its impact on Māori identity and aspirations. Herein we advocate for more inclusive environments that honour the intersections of diverse values, beliefs systems and perspectives of Māori, Pasifika and other marginalised communities. As an authorship team we sit within a research excellence group at the Centre of Indigenous Science. This space validates Māori and Indigenous identity, nurtures personal growth and embraces every facet of existence, from whakapapa to cultural identity, including our shared passion for rugby. This systematic literature review pursues two primary research objectives: firstly, it aims to identify and compare the challenges confronted by wāhine Māori in rugby, examining both Western and te ao Māori perspectives. Secondly, it uncovers effective strategies for addressing these challenges, with the ultimate goal of safeguarding and empowering flourishing wāhine Māori identities (tuakiri) in rugby
Aligning the Vibrations: Resounding Matters
Get PDFTe Kore, to Te Pō, to Te Ao MaramaTe reo Māori (the Māori language) is an oral language, so these “Te Kore, to Te Pō, to Te Ao Marama” words are most commonly encountered as spoken. Unlike Western traditions, precontact Māori cultures did not impose Cartesian divisions between nature and culture on the world. Nor does te reo position entities in an oppositional manner, as for instance the Greek prefix ‘in-’ does on the words ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible.’ Similarly, the Greek prefix ‘inter-’ inscribes the possibility that within oppositional entities there is always an in-between. Sound vibrates, resonates and reverberates, sound is always inherent to material movement, both in its generation and propagation. Vibrations are one of the ways that the material world makes itself felt. If language is communication, then in this understanding it is not just a human prerogative
Creating a Tool to Explore Intergenerational Understandings: Through the use of Virtual Reality in Malaysia
Get PDFThis paper provides an introduction to a research-creation project, focusing on developing a prototype Virtual Reality (VR) educational tool. Younger people in Malaysia have limited exposure to or interest in information relating to the elderly, resulting in an intergenerational disconnect. The wider project aims to develop a VR teaching tool inspired by an existing role-playing simulation game (Aging Game). As a storytelling-based experience, VR can be used to share the discomfort faced by older people when using information and communications technology (ICT) such as computers/cell phones, internet and social media.The project is to explore the potential VR has to act as a bridge between the generations and to raise awareness in younger people about intergenerationalissues. The primary focus of this discussion paper is to discuss design and modification of the VR tool for creating interactive experiences that inhabit both the real and the unreal (virtual) world
Transdisciplinarity in the Dunedin Art+Science Project
Get PDFIn confronting the realities of the global climate crisis, it seems as if we are living in a narrow window of “useful consciousness.” Responding to and tackling the existential threat of the climate crisis requires transdisciplinary methodologies and cooperation. A series of multidiscipline art and science collaborations in Dunedin, New Zealand, focuses a lens on rapidly changing ecological and social effects as human activity encroaches on our planetary boundaries. Our approach allows for processing of the scientific data in bite-sized, digestible chunks and provides a means for storytelling through visual texts and narrative spaces – a methodology essential to connecting with community values and finding solutions to climate anxieties
Multi-Histories: : Creative and Narrative Plurality in Graphic Novels Exploring Indigenous Histories
Get PDFIn this paper, I examine select graphic novels that narrativise intersecting histories by artists who possess distinct social positionalities and subjectivities. The first is Luke W Molver’s two-part graphic novel about King Shaka, Shaka Rising: A Legend of the Warrior Prince (2017) and King Shaka: Zulu Legend (2019). This epic illustrates King Shaka’s rise to power and his unmatched conquering pursuits that helped form the Zulu Kingdom. The second case study is Zinhle (Zhi) Zulu’s – hereafter Zhi Zulu – part-historical, part-futuristic graphic novel The Spiritual Adventures of Nandipha: Protector of the Zulu Kingdom (2019), which visually narrates the story of Nandipha, a superhero whose identity is inspired by King Shaka’s mother, Nandipha, and the influential women in Zhi Zulu’s life. I am specifically interested in how the positionalities of these two comic artists – Molver, a white man, on the one hand and on the other, Zhi Zulu, a black woman – influence their artistic approach, narrative arc, content selection, stylistics and overall treatment of indigenous Zulu histories. Using the notion of pluri- or multi-histories, I argue that these distinct but convergent comic book explorations of the interlinked lives of King Shaka and Nandipha are poignant artistic exemplars of how indigenous histories should always be retold in the plural
Different Light Theatre: : Multimodal Practices in Learning-Disabled Theatre
Get PDFLearning-disabled theatre is often perceived as giving a voice to the voiceless or empowering those marginalised in society. But how can this voice and power avoid becoming co-opted by neoliberal, racial, colonial capital merely to produce the entitled, self-possessed, autonomous individuals that late capitalism needs, but the production of which is destroying the planet? Does the political efficacy of this work consist in the mere presence of learning-disabled artists in these contexts, or is it not rather in the negotiation of the terms of their presence and participation? Interesting answers to these questions emerge in the exploration of the multimodal negotiation of voice, presence, representation and mediation in learning-disabled performance as performance
Navigating Knowledge Frameworks at the Intercultural Interface
Get PDFAs we emerge not altogether unscathed in 2022 into what optimistically might be called a postpandemic world, we are confronted by the pressing need to address global and climate instabilities against a general backdrop of complexity. Potential solutions must be balanced against environmental and societal concerns that cannot take for granted that any system is somehow isolated. Here then is the crux of new materialist and post-humanist approaches – a shift “away from Kant”1 and away it seems, from humancentric understandings of who, or what, has agency in the world.
Despite acknowledging the agencies of non-human others, such as electrical grids2 and quantum entanglement,3 or proposing new speculative realist frameworks by which to engage with such agentic capacities,4 finding workable solutions within such dynamics remains stubbornly difficult. What does become clear, at least, is that these Eurocentric traditions, arising from the European Enlightenment project, have not served the environment particularly well. Newtonian physics can no longer claim mastery over the tangible world through recourse to universal laws acting in isolation, and liberal humanism is revealed to be underpinned by Eurocentric cultural traditions of human exceptionalism and the rights of the individual exceeding the rights of the collective. As I have argued elsewhere,5 such traditions within the European imaginary arise from Judeo-Christian notions of dominion over the nonhuman and are reinforced by successive bifurcations between nature and culture through Plato/Aristotle-Descartes-Kant metaphysical trajectories
Negotiating Different Worlds and Diverse Cultural Legacies Through Applied Creative Practice in a Situated Learning Project: Hlakanyana 2022
Get PDFPrism-like, the 2022 Hlakanyana project at the University of Johannesburg’s (UJ) Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA) refracted both clear and shadowy issues embedded in arts, culture and pedagogy in a society grappling with decolonisation. Participation in the project indicated that transformation imperatives have been compounded by the socio-economic consequences of a two-year lockdown. On 8 March, some 300 masked second-year students, seated in Keorapetse William Kgositsile Theatre auditorium, were introduced to a project that has come to be known as Theatre 101. Daunted and uncertain, they, like similar groups before them, were confronting requirements of designing for an unfamiliar medium amplified by the logistical implications of group work at the start of returning to face-to-face learning. Initial responses at the briefing session indicated skepticism towards an undertaking in which multiplicities converged. My role throughout, as professional designer and academic, was that of participant–observer, and this reflexive report documents the spectrum of intertwined issues that emerged in the UJ initiative rather than pursing a single aspect for sustained interrogation